by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
It seemed like it would have been very hard down there not to have a connection to somebody connected to this case. In the tight white world of Tallahatchie County, social inbreeding was a way of life. There were only five lawyers practicing in Sumner at the time. All five had volunteered to serve on the defense team for Bryant and Milam. Two of the lawyers were partners, and were politically connected: J. J. Breland, who later would make no attempt at all to try to hide his hostility toward black people, and John Whitten, a cousin of Jamie Whitten, the segregationist congressman from the area. There were three lawyers for the prosecution. Gerald Chatham was the district attorney for a four-county area. He was close to retirement, and this was going to be a taxing trial for that man, but he would hang in there. Robert Smith was more energetic. He was an ex-marine and FBI agent, who had been appointed by the governor as a special prosecutor. Finally, there was Hamilton Caldwell, the county prosecutor.
Even with this team of lawyers, we didn’t get a lot of preparation. The prosecutors didn’t seem to have much time for that kind of thing since they were so busy rolling up their sleeves and digging into the investigation. Sheriff Strider was no help at all. At least not to the prosecution. As a result, I don’t recall being asked too many questions about my background or Emmett’s character. I wasn’t coached on what to expect from the defense team or how to handle it. I knew why I was there. I was Emmett’s mother. No one could know a son like his mother. The identity of the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was going to be crucial in this case. And I had to be firm, I had to be certain, I had to be convincing in my testimony that the body was that of my son. So that was pretty much it. And, of course, one other thing: I was cautioned always to put a handle on those responses from the witness stand. “Yes, sir.” “No, sir.” Oh, that was so important down there.
A quiet debate was still going on about just where this trial should be held. The question hadn’t been completely answered about exactly where Emmett’s murder took place. He was kidnapped in Leflore County and his body was found in Tallahatchie County, so the assumption was that he was killed in Tallahatchie. But there was a lot of talk—more like whispering, really—among black folks that Emmett could have been murdered in Sunflower County. From there, he could have been carried to the spot where he was found in the Tallahatchie River. If that could be established, then the whole trial would have to move, which would suit a lot of people just fine. Black people who knew these things knew that this case would have a much better chance of reaching a just result in front of a jury in Sunflower or even Leflore County than in Tallahatchie. The defense lawyers seemed to be aware of that, too, based on reports about their strategy. Leflore County was holding on to the kidnapping part of the case and would decide whether to indict after the murder trial. The defense lawyers wanted everything tried together in one big bundle. Apparently, the defense lawyers wanted it all handled right there in Tallahatchie County for the same reason many black folks wanted it anywhere but there. Tallahatchie had a reputation for being a mean place, very hostile toward blacks. And when I say “mean,” well, we’re talking mean by Delta standards, which was as bad as it gets.
Nowhere was the hostility more clear than with Sheriff H. C. Strider. Oh, God, if that man had been an actor, he would have played the part of a racist Southern sheriff. He looked the part. He lived the part. Every day of his life, he lived it. He was malicious, he was hostile, he was in charge. Of everything, it seemed. Even the courthouse. That’s how it was in those Southern counties back then. And county sheriffs got to be well off because of their power. Strider owned a large plantation, which was the key to finding him if you bothered to look in the telephone book. Under P. David Halberstam learned that’s where you’d have to look for Strider. Under P for “plantation.” So he ran everything and he was determined to run a tight ship during this trial.
Monday, the first day, started off with a meeting run by Sheriff Strider. He was laying down the law. He told the press that there would be reserved seating for twenty-two white reporters up front, near the judge’s bench. He also had arranged for seating for the black press. Four seats, off to the side, behind the railing, next to a window. It didn’t matter to him whether or not the black reporters could hear anything that far away. It didn’t matter to him whether the black reporters even had access to his courtroom, when you got right down to it. One thing did matter to him, though. There hadn’t been any race mixing in his county up to that point and there wasn’t going to be any during that trial. To make matters worse, there was no “Colored” washroom, no “Colored” drinking fountain in the courthouse building. Black folks would have to go down the street to a black diner, where the black reporters would set up shop during the day. Bryant and Milam would use the washroom in the judge’s chambers. Strider made it clear he didn’t want the white and black reporters getting cozy, consulting, comparing notes. The Ebony-Jet team had brought along two photographers, David Jackson, who was black, and Mike Shea, who was white. It was a shrewd decision by publisher John H. Johnson to have someone who might get into places the black team members might not be able to go. Strider did at least allow the black reporters to take the back stairs to the courtroom along with the white reporters and jurors, according to Jimmy Hicks, the reporter from the Baltimore Afro-American. That way they could avoid the crush of spectators coming into the court on the main stairs up front. Strider handed out press passes. That would be a help. One of the things black reporters wanted to make sure they’d avoid was having any incidents while they were there. Even accidental contact with white folks: bumping into somebody on crowded stairs could have been a disaster. But accidentally bumping into each other was what some of the black reporters and the white reporters wound up working out, just so they could talk things through, sort them out every now and then. The white reporters out of the North already were starting to challenge the rigid Southern way of life. But quietly.
The court was packed on that first day. There were reports that there were up to four hundred people in a courtroom with seats for less than half that many. Blacks could take a few seats in the rear, or stand in the rear or along the sides toward the rear. That crowd was unbelievable. It was intolerable. The heat was in the upper nineties, but someone said the temperature in that courtroom was at least 118 degrees. Judge Curtis Swango, who sipped Coca-Cola, told the men they could shed their jackets. That was some relief. Vendors squeezed by the people in the aisles to sell soda pop. To everybody, except black folks. People brought box lunches. Anybody who was not known to the deputies at the door had to be searched. Strider made a big deal out of the death threats he said he had received. Even so, there was a rumor that many whites carried weapons all the time, even into court.
Up front, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam sat with their wives and their sons. Two sons each, running around, playing constantly up front where the attorneys were questioning and challenging the potential jurors until they had run out of time for the day. The lawyers had only selected ten and would wait until the next morning to pick the last two. Court was adjourned. But, for Dr. Howard, Ruby Hurley, Medgar Evers, the black reporters, and the rest, the work was just about to get started.
Tuesday, September 20, was to be my first official appearance in the courtroom. Before nine in the morning, Rayfield, Daddy, and I made our way to the courthouse. Even in the morning, the weather was pretty much like the town itself: oppressive and unforgiving. The temperature was bad enough. But the humidity and the heat together made it so much worse. It felt like we had walked into hell.
There was no protection arranged for us. I kept looking around expecting to have somebody, federal marshals, the FBI, anybody. But we were on our own. The only thing that made me feel somewhat protected was the fact that there were so many reporters all over the place. I figured nothing could happen with all the reporters there to see it. People had so little experience with the media that they actually thought television cameras and radio microphones were broadcasting live
. In fact, the media were flying their film back to New York every day to be processed.
As we made our way past all the people and the reporters to the courthouse, I couldn’t help but look up at the statue of a Confederate soldier that stood in the blazing heat outside the courthouse building. Straight up, he stood, like the point on a sundial. Marking time, keeping watch. As we approached the building, gazing at the soldier, I heard the pop of an explosion. It startled me, made me jump. I looked up to see some white boys hanging out of the courthouse window with their fathers, laughing. One of the boys had aimed a cap pistol at me and fired. They all thought that was very funny. They would think that. These were the same people who would joke about how only a black boy would steal a gin fan and then try to carry it across a river. And then say straight-faced that they didn’t know what all the fuss was about. After all, that Tallahatchie River was full of niggers. That’s what they would say. There would be so many more heartless things they would say as they stood around out there or hung out of windows. The attitude of that place was simmering. Somewhere, not far from the court, it was reported, somebody had burned a cross. In the crazy carnival setting of Sumner, with children taking target practice out of a courthouse window, and soft drink vendors turning that Mississippi heat into profit, and cruel jokes passing around in the slow-marching shadow of a Confederate memorial, and news organizations rushing film each day to New York, somehow in the midst of all that, nobody even seemed to be distracted much at all by a burning cross.
Rod Serling, like so many other writers, would later draw inspiration from this event, this trial of the human experience, by crafting several television dramas. That seemed so fitting to me, because, looking back on it, that place was “the Twilight Zone.” I mean, I felt like I had been transported to some distant time and place, a very strange world. Planet Mississippi. Everything there seemed so different from the place I had left behind. There, everything was hostile and insecure and threatening.
There was all that and the absolute pressure of the moment for me.
Inside the courtroom, I was mobbed by the reporters, who wanted to record Mamie Bradley’s first appearance at the trial. The questions were routine and I was able to keep my answers brief. There had been a slight delay of the proceedings on this morning. Someone must have decided that four seats would not be enough for the black press and all the black witnesses and other special observers who would attend the trial. So there was a short recess to dig up a table for us. When I say “dig up,” that’s about what they seemed to do. I mean, that table was rough and unfinished and the splinters tore into my dress and scratched my arms. We also would wind up playing a strange game of musical chairs. Whenever we’d recess, some of the white folks would take some of our chairs and the black reporters would just take it in stride. They’d have to stand up nearby. But who was going to complain?
There was a bit of commotion shortly after I came in. It was Charles Diggs, the congressman from Detroit. Congressman Diggs had written to Judge Swango asking if he could sit in on the trial as an observer. The judge had given his permission, but somebody forgot to tell Sheriff Strider and his crew. When Diggs and a couple of associates couldn’t get in the door, the reporter Jimmy Hicks got involved and offered to take the congressman’s card to the judge.
Hicks recalled a deputy taking the card and remarking to one of his cronies, “This nigger says that other nigger is a congressman.”
“A nigger congressman?” the second deputy exclaimed. “It ain’t possible. It ain’t even legal.”
Somehow, everything got worked out and the U.S. congressman, the highest-ranking public official to attend the murder trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, finally was given a seat. At the Jim Crow table.
It was so uncomfortable in that courtroom. The temperature was bad enough. But the heat from those people—not their body heat, but their emotional heat, their hatred—made it all so much worse. I could stand the heat, but the hatred was intolerable. I had brought a little silk fan with me, but it didn’t do much good. At one point, I raised my hand to order a soda pop from one of the white vendors. What was I thinking? All he served up was disgust.
Somebody must have said something to Sheriff Strider about trying to be more polite to the black visitors, the press, the observers, the rest of us. So he began greeting us all, “Mornin’, niggahs.”
As we sat there and as I fanned away the indignities and tried to listen to the jury questions, I glanced in the direction of Bryant and Milam. I could only see the backs of their heads from where we were sitting. And, really, that’s about all I cared to see. I didn’t want to look at them. But I was kind of drawn in that direction. Even from behind, they seemed so calm, like they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no stress. They smoked cigarettes, at times they read the newspaper. Their wives were constantly at their sides; sometimes even their mother was there. Mostly, though, I found myself watching their children. The way they played with their daddies. I watched those four little boys. I could see those babies playing on their daddies’ laps, pulling on their noses and their ears and doing all kinds of things that they might well have been doing at home. I thought about how Emmett used to play like that. On my lap, or Mama’s. I thought about how I had looked forward to his children one day doing the same thing. I considered that, how I would never have the chance to play with my grandchildren on my lap. And then I thought about those little boys across the way from me, the Bryant boys and the Milam boys, and how I could take each of those boys and raise them as my own, and love them in the process. I caught myself. That thought even shocked me. But, then, maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe I just wanted to save them from their fathers, save them from themselves. The way any mother might want to do. Or maybe it was to save other mothers and other mothers’ sons from the legacy of hatred that just might be handed down to them by their fathers. That is, after all, how it works. We don’t come here with hatred in our hearts. We have to be taught to feel that way. We have to want to be that way, to please the people who teach us to want to be like them. Strange, to think that people might learn to hate as a way of getting some approval, some acceptance, some love. I thought about all that before I realized that I couldn’t let myself think about it any longer.
There was tension in the air. It wasn’t just the hostility of the white folks, the antagonism they felt just seeing all the media attention that had been given to me and to Congressman Diggs. There was something else, too. It was just beneath the surface, or maybe floating just above it, at the table with the black press. The proceedings were dull as the lawyers worked their way through the jury prospects. Someone mentioned that you could tell by the questions that the prosecutors didn’t plan to seek the death penalty. You have to ask jurors how they feel about that if you expect them to decide on it. The prosecutors didn’t ask about that and it meant they might not have felt they had a strong enough case. That wasn’t reassuring. It wasn’t that I wanted the death penalty for those men. But I wanted to know that the prosecutors felt they had a solid case to get a conviction.
I looked across our table and Ruby Hurley was taking notes. She would take notes like that during the entire trial, just like the reporters. She wrote the field reports for The Crisis, but she always seemed to be noting things, analyzing things, keeping records.
Finally, the lawyers came up with two more people to sit on the panel. It took all morning to do that, but it meant they were being very careful in making the choices. There were ten farmers, an insurance man, and a carpenter. And that tension lingered. It was like everybody at the black press table knew something was about to happen and nobody was saying anything. We had had a discussion earlier. I can’t recall who came up with the plan, but somebody thought we needed one. There had been a story about a trial somewhere in the Delta where a black defendant had been shot and killed by one of the white spectators right there in the courtroom. If something happened in this trial, we would not be in a good spot, since we’d hav
e to run through a huge mob of angry white folks just to get to the doorway in the back. So somebody had suggested a plan to head for the window right there next to the table. If a problem should arise, somebody would help the ladies out first and then it would be every man for himself. I didn’t know how serious this plan was. It was quite a drop down to the ground, but that had been the nature of the anxiety there at the table. Even so, that wasn’t it. This tension was more like anticipation. Something was about to happen. Everybody knew it, but nobody was saying anything about it.
With the selection of the last juror, the judge dismissed the rest of the prospects. Nobody left their seats. Everybody wanted to stay for the trial, for the show. But it would be a short day for this audience. The district attorney, Gerald Chatham, stood to ask for a recess. He had been given information about surprise witnesses and needed time to locate them. J. J. Breland, the lead defense lawyer, rose to object. The judge ruled that the request was a reasonable one. He adjourned until nine the next morning. So, for the second time, there would be a recess: the first to serve the interests of Jim Crow, the second to serve the interests of justice. And there was an odd sort of balance to that. The judge also told the crowd that he was going to have to limit picture taking while court was in session. No exceptions. There also would be no one standing in the aisles the next day. If you didn’t get there early enough to get a seat, you couldn’t stay if you weren’t taking part in the trial.
The black reporters at our table didn’t say anything. There would be plenty of time to talk later about the things that were yet to unfold. Plenty of time to write about them. Jimmy Hicks would report the whole thing in a four-part series that would run in the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Call and Post, and the Atlanta Daily World, compiled years later by Christopher Metress. Simeon Booker would call it “an incredible interracial manhunt” in his version of the story written for the Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, which would come out within a month or so after the trial. But at the black press table at that moment, on Tuesday, as the judge ordered a recess until Wednesday, the reporters said nothing about it. Reporters can be like that. They are used to protecting their sources. In this case, though, they were protecting lives. And to hear their chilling accounts of this story is to learn why they felt they had to do it that way.